Fighting Racism Through an Omni-American Vision
I strongly believe that a critical step in fighting racism is clearly distinguishing culture from the idea of race. The conflation of race and culture accelerates confusion over American identity and blocks human fraternity and democratic action regardless of differences in beliefs, political allegiances, and lifestyles. This is a recurring theme for me, as in the polemical “Culture vs Race: American Identity Hangs in the Balance” and the more analytical follow-up essay, “Culture vs Race: The Problem and Promise of Values.” Racialization is the process by which so-called races come into being, so I’ve advocated for deracialization in this newsletter and elsewhere.
Last Thursday, for a virtual conference, “Abolishing Racism: Creating a Future without Race,” I elaborated upon my previous work in a paper titled “Deracialization and the Omni-American Vision." This excerpt from that presentation focuses on how Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray separated race and culture in their thought.
Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison
In a letter to Murray in 1958, Ellison wrote about an exchange he had on a panel at the Newport Jazz Festival with a composer-critic who, when Ellison mentioned the tie between the Negro American dance audience and jazz bands, interrupted Ellison to say that “he didn’t believe that Jazz was connected to the life of any racial group in this country.”
The conflation of race and culture reared its ugly head yet again.
Ellison wrote to Murray, “I don’t fight the race problem in matters of culture, but anyone should know the source of their tradition before they start shooting off their mouth about where jazz comes from (emphasis added).”
Culturally speaking, jazz was birthed in the bosom of Afro-American life and culture. That is not a racial claim; it’s an ethnocultural and historical fact.
Also in 1958, Ellison said in an interview that, “As for the term ‘culture’ . . . I know of no valid demonstration that culture is transmitted through the genes. . . . Nor should the existence of a specifically ‘Negro’ idiom in any way be confused with the vague, racist terms ‘white culture’ or ‘black culture’; rather, it is a matter of diversity within unity.”
Yes, as a subculture, Afro-Americans innovated an idiomatic style and way of life expressed in their artistic and cultural forms. However, Ellison argued that conflating race (“white” and “black”) with culture (idiom) is fallacious because it separates and segregates Americans who are indeed related culturally beyond the confines of race.
He made a similar point 21 years later, extending and refining his original insight.
In a 1979 address at Brown University titled “Portrait of Inman Page: A Dedication Speech,” Ellison spoke of Page, one of the first Afro-American graduates of Brown during the Reconstruction period, and of his experience as a young man at Douglass High School in Oklahoma when Dr. Page was its principal. Ellison recalled the early New England tradition of education of which both he and Dr. Page were heirs because of the “young graduates of New England colleges who went south to teach newly freed slaves.”
Ellison continued:
I think it is a good idea to keep this historical circumstance in mind when we hear glib talk of a ‘white culture’ and a ‘black culture’ in the United States. Because the truth of the matter is that between the two racial groups, there has always been a constant exchange of cultural and stylistic elements. Whether in the arts, education, athletics, or in certain conceptions and misconceptions of democratic justice, interchange, appropriation, and integration (not segregation) have been the constants of our developing nation.
So, at this particular moment of our history, I think it important that we keep in mind that the culture of the United States is a composite, pluralistic culture-of-cultures, and that all of its diverse elements have been to some extent inspirited by those ideals which were enshrined during the founding of this nation. In our embrace of these ideals, we are one and yet many, and never more so than after they led to the Civil War, the Emancipation and the Reconstruction.
That’s the Ellison side of the culture vs. race debate; now, let’s consider Albert Murray’s perspective on the predicament.
Murray and Ellison with bookshelf backdrop
In the first chapter of The Omni-Americans, Murray wrote that he considered race a “sterile category” that is “hardly useful as an index to human motives as is culture.” In the introduction of the same classic work, he also wrote that ". . . the function of education in the United States is to develop citizens who are fully oriented to cultural diversity—and are not hung up on race."
In 1994, a writer named Louis Edwards interviewed Murray, beginning by discussing his first book, The Omni-Americans. Murray explained that the work was stimulated by the civil rights movement and his exploration of “who these people were and how they saw themselves . . . So, I wanted to define what it meant to be an American and how we fit into it. I came up with the idea that we’re fundamental to it—that you can’t be an American unless you are part us, just as you can’t be an American unless you’re part them. I came up with the concept of a culture that, as a context, makes for, literally and figuratively speaking, a mulatto culture. . . . America is interwoven with all these different strains. The subtitle of that section of the book is ‘E Pluribus Unum’—one out of many . . . they represent what [American cultural philosopher] Constance Rourke calls a composite.”
Edwards says: “Then the term ‘Omni-Americans’ applies not just to African-Americans, but to all Americans ...”
Yes. Absolutely. We’re looking for universality. We’re looking for the common ground of man. . . if you go from culture, instead of the impossibility of race—because you can’t define race. It doesn’t meet our intellectual standard with scientific observation and definition. It won’t meet it! You see, race is an ideological concept. It has to do with manipulating people, and with power, and with controlling people . . . It has no basis in reality. . . . So, you enter into patterns and variations in culture to make sense of things. What you find are variations we can call idiomatic. People do the same things and have the same basic human impulses, but they come out differently. The language changes because of the environment and so forth. Now, you get the environment, you get the cultural elements, and from those things you can predict the behavior of people fairly well. But if you look at such racial characteristics as may be used—whether it’s the shape of certain body parts, the texture of the hair, the lips, and all—you cannot get a scientific correlation between how [a] guy looks and how he behaves. If you find a large number of people who look like each other and behave like each other, it’s because of the culture.
—Albert Murray
Outchorus
Omni-Americans are the many comprising the oneness of American identity. That oneness, or as philosopher Danielle Allen puts it, that wholeness is an idea, an ideal, a democratic horizon of aspiration. Yes. Yet, if American citizens don’t learn to embody and enact such a vision, I’m concerned that our nation may perish under the weight of anti-democratic, illiberal authoritarianism via an executive branch run amok.
I strive to embody an Omni-American vision and identity and to perpetuate its insights and virtues to current and future generations through the organization I co-direct, the Omni-American Future Project. It’s my hope and intention that we as a nation can indeed realize our promise and thrive by freeing ourselves from the shackles of a worldview based on race, racialization, and racism and integrating into our vision, belief, and behavior the generative qualities of American culture at its best.